A Dream Come True

Journal Entry before I left San Francisco

I got back on Friday morning, after a TWO HOUR delay, which made the red eye go to star spangled banner eye. After two days of serious effed up jet lag and two days of debilitating migraine, I feel like today is the day I just got back into town. HOORAY!

I took the subway into work--my new assignment at the same place I've been working for a year--where I only work for THREE DAYS A WEEK (thank you very much). I am SO HAPPY about this new development. For the first time in my life, I have made a conscious effort to make more time for my art. The idea that I have FOUR DAYS outside an office, is just so new to me I can't even imagine what that paradigm shift will feel like.

Like a lot of people, I have had fantasies for years about quitting the working week cold turkey to do my art. I've been angry at spending so much of my life pent up in an environment that is not my natural habitat, doing things that I am good at, but totally bored with. I kept trying to make plans or have ideas how one MAGICAL day I could get to a MAGICAL place and have EVERYTHING FIGURED OUT, so that I could give notice to that world, and fly away on a magic carpet ride to BEING AN ARTIST full-time.

But here are the things that this plan or idea ignores:

*the fact that it's hard to make that plan succinctly, when you are working 40 hours a week at one job, and 20 hours (or more) at another job (your art). After 10 years of this dynamic, burn out is totally natural and yet terrifying.
*the fact that I don't do well without STRUCTURE. Give me everyday all to myself and I panic and slip into a sort of ice age, where I FREEZE.
*The fact that all or nothing thinking has gotten me into TROUBLE in the past.

The truth is I need a job right now, not only to make sure I have the basics covered, but to make me have SOMETHING that gets me into the world a little. I need people, I need a reason to go outside, I need a predetermined schedule. Knowing that, I can still make my art a priority. It's a good start.

Financially, it's of course a shift that will be interesting to see (ahem) how it works, but it's actually finacially EXACTLY what I dreamed of when I left California 18 months ago. I was at a crappy job that paid me rediculously low. I remember saying to my friend Jen at the time, "My fantasy is to find a job in New York that is half the time, at twice the pay." VOILA!

This is a great thing to remind myself who gets so jealous of other people's apprent ability to manifest dreams into realities. Apparently, I can do it too. DANG!

This is a great start to the New Year. I have LOTS OF PLANS. It will be interesting to see what will ACTUALLY happen (it never looks like you think--for better or for worse), but I am excited to finally give myself time to the things that matter most. This is a dream come true. Truly.